Le plongeon

Frank Perry's screen adaptation of the achingly sad John Cheever short story gets the tone of Cheever's story just right, even if the movie itself doesn't have quite the same impact.

There have been countless strong and powerful films made around the theme of suburban loneliness, and this movie belongs to that genre. There's something so poignant about the idea that someone can exist in a world that's manufactured for the sole purpose of providing its inhabitants with luxury, pleasure and convenience, and still be miserable. You'd think people would have gotten the point by now, and figured out that privilege, wealth and materialism have virtually nothing to do with ultimate happiness, but if our own consumerist culture is any indication, they haven't.

What helps "The Swimmer" to stand out from other similarly-themed films is the way the story is told. It's only through the reactions of others that we begin to sense what's wrong with Burt Lancaster's character. To us, he looks the picture of middle-aged robustness and health. Lancaster became a much better actor as he aged, and he gives a wonderful performance here, as his bravado and macho virility (the strutting and preening of a man on top of the world) slowly dissolves into a lost insecurity, until the film's final devastating moments leave him as forlorn as a baby.

What a sad, sad movie.

Grade: A-

This movie is not for everyone, but everyone I know who's seen it admits that it's one-of-a-kind. Burt Lancaster is flat-out powerful in the lead, as the man who decides one day to swim his way through his neighbors' pools to his home. As he makes his way pool by pool we learn more and more about Burt's real character. A kaleidoscopic study of how we see ourselves, versus how others see us. One of my favorites, please give this movie a shot.

Judging by the comments here, apparently I'm not the only one who was incredibly moved by this masterpiece--a masterpiece of storytelling on Cheever's part, that is, and a more than passable film portrayal of what one might call "the perfect short story." If HBO had existed in the 1960s, and Rod Serling had written for it, this is what "Twilight Zone" might have looked like: a tangled, twisted terrain of the human psyche that leads to the deepest of our fears--and the most profound of our hopes. The stakes for Ned Merrill, as we come to discover, are about as high as they can be for any character not caught in a literal life and death struggle. But he might as well be, judging by the size and fearsomeness of the phantoms that haunt his way. For this reason I think I'd say that other than *Glengarry Glen Ross,* this is the most terrifying film ever made.

In contrast to many others, however, I don't think Ned is delusional: I think he's spent so long believing his own publicity, as it were, that he hasn't fully accepted what has happened to him. (And of course, "what has happened to him" is almost entirely of his own making, which makes his predicament all the more painful because it seems to offer no hope of redemption.) And he's clearly one of those hail-fellow-well-met types who, when he promises he's going to do something for someone--as he continually does in the movie, right up to the point where he promises to pay his bill to a local proprietor--he truly means it, at least in the moment.

Additionally, "The Swimmer" seems like far too profound a work to tie it to themes as dreary and shopworn as the emptiness of suburban life or the dark side of the American dream. Granted, a great deal of powerful literature, dating back at least to Nathanael West's *Day of the Locust*, has been written around the second of these ideas, but "The Swimmer" seems to speak to something much deeper, a haunted place in the human soul. In the ads for the movie--which, in sharp contrast to the brilliant development of the story itself, attempted to lay out all the details in a way at once pedantic and almost pandering (as previews in those days tended to be), a voice-over asks if the viewer might see Ned in him- or herself.

*The Swimmer* is an epic, but an unusual one. Not because of the small scale and the deceptively trivial-seeming stakes involved it the epic journey--that's an idea Joyce introduced years earlier in *Ulysses*--but because of that journey's destination. Ned isn't going toward a new land, but back--back to nothing short of Eden. And if it's an epic, then he's a hero of sorts, and not entirely an antihero either. After all, even with all the things you learn about him along the way, it's hard not to root for Ned Merrill.

John Cheever's short story of 1964 is his most anthologised and here Eleanor Perry, wife of director Frank, has achieved the feat of expanding its twelve pages into a film of ninety five minutes. Cheever's prose is meticulous of course but the tale itself is relatively uneventful and the participants insubstantial so that plenty of fleshing out of episodes and characters has been required, even to the point of adding a few!

Two of the additions are Julie played by newcomer Janet Lindgard who admits to having had a teenage crush on the Ned Merrill of Burt Lancaster but then repulses his advances. The other is the boy Kevin of Michael Kearney with whom Ned 'swims' the length of an empty pool. It is during this scene that Ned utters the crucial words that provide a key to his character:"if you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you."

We never discover the nature of Ned's 'misfortune' and what has caused his fall from grace although it is hinted at by various characters throughout his aquatic odyssey across the quasi-subterranean string of swimming pools that lead to his home. In believing that his previously affluent life has not changed is he suffering from the ultimate self-deception or has he had a mental breakdown? It is both fitting and ironic that the grim reality of his situation is brought home to him not in the private pools of his social set but by some distinctly unpleasant people in the public swimming baths.

The most telling encounter is that of Ned and a former lover Shirley Abbott played by Janice Rule. What is the briefest of exchanges in the original story has been developed here into one of the bitterest scenes between male and female on film. Ned approaches her with great optimism but his hopes are soon dashed when she lashes out at him for his selfishness and thoughtlessness which leads to his self-pitying lament "we are all going to die."

Could this be the true meaning of Cheever's story I wonder and is this simply an allegory for the ageing process? At the opening of the story Ned is described by Cheever as resembling 'the last hours of a summer's day.' As his journey progresses his stamina is sapped, he feels chilly and his bones begin to ache. I trust it is not too fanciful to see in this the inevitable decline from glorious summer, through the sere and yellow leaf of autumn to the winter of discontent. Just a theory of course.

What is certain however is that this is one of Mr. Lancaster's finest performances and interesting to learn that prior to making this, not only was he unable to swim, he suffered from aquaphobia!

The Swimmer is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. The story is simple but unusual. A successful executive - Ned Merrill - (in the end we realize that this is not quite so), in a psychological trance, imagine being in a time before the real and decides to "go home", the metaphor that supports the film. His return happens in a planned way, passing by the pools of his friends and acquaintances, forming what he calls "The River Lucinda", in fact his dream of returning to the woman he lost in his uncontrolled life. In this dream he thinks of his two daughters who would be expecting him too. And by the way he traces he finds people who still consider him and people who despise him, the fruit of what he did of his life until then. It is a very strong metaphor and produces a gigantic film. Burt Lancaster, I think, made the best part of his career here. I think this film could only have been performed with him in the lead role. Each one of us is incorporated into the story, living with Ned all his dramas, every moment of his "return home." The sequence in which he fights a race with a horse is the most perfect that is known, is exquisite. And he finds women who were part of his past not well understood, but that gives us the dimension of a superficial life and frivolities. Actress Janice Rule has here, too, one of her biggest moments in the movies. It's beautiful. The unexpected and perfect ending of the film completes this vigorous story of a man who has lost his way in life and can not find himself again. I watched The Swimmer in 1968 when it was released and I've been watching it regularly over the last 50 years. Each time I discover a detail, a situation that I did not perceive well, it is an incredible experience. Great, great, great movie!